Hardcover Honey's Haunted Bookclub ~ 'Luckiest Girl Alive'

I am a bit of a blurb whore, so when I saw that this book had a cover blurb from one of my favorite authors, Megan Abbott, I was even more excited to crack it open. And for the most part, it did not disappoint!

Skinny beautiful Ani FaNelli seems to have it all: the hot job at a women’s magazine, the pricey clothes and the hottie fiancée from a fancy family who seems charmed instead of turned off by her blue-collar background. If only everybody knew how desperately hard the former TifAni is working to keep this veneer in place… the very personification of an unreliable and unpleasant narrator, Ani has lots of bitchy asides to the reader, including “I make seventy thousand dollars a year. If I lived in Kansas City, I’d be Paris fucking Hilton” (For the record, I live in Kansas City and I can tell you with certainty that this isn’t the case, but hey, we know what the coast people think of us out here in the flyover states) and “I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself when I turn thirty."

Author Jessica Knoll

TifAni has some dark secrets in her past, tied to her attendance at an exclusive private school called The Bradley School, and she’s been asked to participate in a documentary about events there, undisclosed to us until later in the book. We do get lots of build-up in flashbacks of TifAni and her attempts to fit in even back in high school with the popular fast-paced crowd and all of the lengths she goes to in order to do so.

My friends and I often talk about how we wouldn’t be teenage girls again for a million dollars, and this book certainly reinforced that. It’s hard enough being the average 14-year-old girl trying to find your way through the intricate unspoken laws of high school, without throwing in a depressed overweight gay best friend, an attractive young male teacher who seems to take a special interest in you, a group of boys who want to pass you around like popcorn, girls who think you deserve nothing more, and access to firearms, obviously a hot-button fear for all of us these days. When the book reaches its first climax, a school shooting, Knoll takes us deep into the emotions running through TifAni’s head as she runs, hides, and eventually becomes part of the myths surrounding the incident. In that way, it reminded me of another horrifying novel, Ready, Okay, which I am forever recommending.

Although this one fizzled out a bit for me at the end, and comparisons to Gillian Flynn’s female characters are somewhat overstated, I still feel comfortable recommending this to Horror Honeys readers.

Hardcover Honey Rating: 4 out of 5 nasty classroom notes passed back and forth on this oneWhat are you reading this week?Tell me on Twitter: @jbrivard